Threshold concepts have been widely utilized to understand learning in academic disciplines and student experiences in a disciplinary curriculum. This study considered how threshold concepts might operate within an interdisciplinary setting. Data were collected through interviews with 40 doctoral students enrolled in an interdisciplinary program…

Many contemporary researchers claim to use a phenomenological approach but seldom connect their methods to tenets from phenomenological philosophy. We describe a distinctive approach, grounded in the writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for conducting educational research. Procedures are outlined for bracketing pre-understandings…

Rosemarie T. Truglio is the senior vice president of curriculum and content at Sesame Workshop, where she is responsible for the development of the interdisciplinary curriculum on which "Sesame Street" is based, and oversees content development across platforms such as television, publishing, toys, home video, and theme park activities.…

Vijay Kumar Bhatia retired from his role as a professor at the City University of Hong Kong and is now Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University in Athens, and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has extensive experience of teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels over a period exceeding 50 years in…

While many university students take science courses in multiple disciplines, little is known about how they perceive common concepts from different disciplinary perspectives. Structure-property and structure-function relationships have long been considered important explanatory concepts in the disciplines of chemistry and biology, respectively.…

Zero-order systems provide an interesting opportunity for students to think about the underlying mechanism behind the physical phenomena being modeled. The work reported here is part of a larger study that seeks to characterize how students integrate chemistry and mathematics in the context of chemical kinetics. Thirty-six general chemistry…

Community colleges nationwide are retrofitting their campuses to meet best environmental principles, creating comprehensive "living laboratories" where participants have a direct impact on reducing an institution's carbon footprint. Environmental stewardship is a growing priority among millennials, observers say. Sixty-six percent of…

Museum partnerships can involve significant tensions, especially when these collaborations reach across institutions to blend disciplines such as art and mathematics. Rather than simply being obstacles to overcome, we suggest that tensions arising in multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary collaborations can be highly generative for collaborators,…

As scientific teams in academia have become increasingly large, interdisciplinary, and diverse, more attention has been paid to honorary authorship (i.e., giving authorship to those not making a significant contribution). Our study examined whether honorary authorship occurs because of the desire to include all or many team members. Interviews…

There is no previous study of the benefits of attending a national multidisciplinary conference dedicated to undergraduate researchers, despite the growing number of such conferences internationally. This paper addresses the gap in knowledge of the learning gains from these conferences, and reveals a student driven learning process, a…

Many industrial arts, technology education, and now technology and engineering education leaders have made their mark on our profession. Their legacy is something that members of the profession enjoy and have a responsibility to continue and build upon. This is the thirteenth in a series of articles entitled "The Legacy Project." The…

This article reports on a Danish study on interprofessional collaboration between child psychiatrists and educational psychologists concerning children who are categorised as being at risk. Methodologically, the analysis is grounded in qualitative interviews with psychologists. A Foucauldian approach is applied to narratives and experiences that…

Despite the number of university students who take courses in multiple science disciplines, little is known about how they connect concepts between disciplines. Energy is a concept that underlies all scientific phenomena and, as such, provides an appropriate context in which to investigate student connections and misconnections across disciplines.…

This chapter describes a multidisciplinary faculty self-study about reciprocity in service-learning. The study began with each coauthor participating in a Decoding interview. We describe how Decoding combined with collaborative self-study had a positive impact on our teaching practice.

Student volunteer experiences are ubiquitous within higher education contexts. Despite this, there is further scope for understanding the qualitatively different ways students experience volunteering. To achieve this an explicit focus on understanding volunteer experiences from the students' perspective and the relationship these experiences have…